As more and more computing devices are being used in people's daily life, security has become a widespread concern for users and content providers. Viruses, worms, Trojan horses, identity theft, software and media content piracy, and extortion using threats of data destruction are rampant. Usually, these attacks involve installing and executing malicious software codes to expose access to device resources that would otherwise be private to the system, the content provider, the user or an application.
For example, a hacker program when running in consumer computing devices developed to play audio/video content, such as Hollywood movies or music, could potentially allow the cracking of the encryption used to secure the A/V content. Therefore, high levels of security are usually required for such devices.
An operating system may provide some security features to guard against such attacks. However, the security features of an operating system often fail to keep up with new attacks occurring on a daily basis. Moreover, when booting a computing device, security features may not yet be initialized and are vulnerable to bypass and/or tampering.
Another way to guard against these attacks is to completely seal a computing device from installing and/or running any additional software after shipped out from manufacturers. Such a strict measure, however, severely limits the capabilities and the flexibilities of the underlying computing device. Not only does it make upgrading a computing device costly and difficult, it is not able to take advantage of increasing number of applications which do require downloading and running software codes from outside the device. In addition, the rapid technology advancement usually renders the applications or functionalities originally built inside a computing device obsolete within a very short period of time.
Therefore, current security measures do not deliver a robust solution to protect applications and content inside a computing device, while at the same time providing the flexibility to update the software and or firmware for the device.